[Translation] Virtus.Pros Team Analyst

[Translation] Virtus.Pros Team Analyst

Nikolay (Yan) Prohorenko, ex Team Secret analyst, joined Virtus.pro in September 2016. He talks about what exactly his job of a Dota 2 analyst is about.

— How do you prepare for The Kiev Major?— We took a small break after the qualifiers, but usually we practice every day of the week for 4-5 hours, and play some scrims on top of that.

— What kind of goals lay specifically on you?— Usually I gather notes on some team and turn those into short, simple and coherent ideas for our players. I also run stats, both of our team and of others. Plus a ton of small things I could describe as “trying to do everything in my power to help my team win.”

— Run us through your usual work day.— In-between the tournaments, I simply watch official matches of some teams, go through any possible forums and portals to find some kind of tricks that are still generally unknown, something that can be used in practice or an official match. We play a lot of scrims with teams of our level, about 3-5 matches a day. Then I do reports for each day we played scrims.

During the tournaments it’s way worse (for me especially). Usually, to prepare I have to watch 10-15 replays of our opponents (in peace and quiet if possible). Usually I do not sleep at night during tournaments, and my work day starts at 10pm and ends at 3-4pm the day after. Why? Usually there are no PCs I could use, and a corporate laptop isn’t enough. So I wait until everyone goes to sleep, down some coffee and energy drinks and watch replays with my notepad and excel tables for 6-7 hours.

— Have you played Dota 2 before and how successful were you?— I did play Dota 2. Hard to say how successful that was though. I never looked for a team, the only motivation I had was to know the game better than anybody.

— How did you become an esports analyst?— I was watching the professional scene since for quite a while. With time, I started noticing that, if I had the opportunity, I could improve many aspects of play for some teams, including things that could be judged objectively and things that do not have a “human” factor: warding, laning, positioning in different situations and so on; everything that could be practiced in advance and not decided “in the heat of the moment.”

I also found a passion for writing scripts, while it was still allowed, it was helping my team back in Team Secret. Even before ending up in TS I was helping a few beta-testers, which gave me a lot of connections in this area (including Dota 2 dev team), so I figured quite a lot of stuff about the inner workings of the game.

— What kind of software do you use to gather your data?— In Team Secrets I had scripts for the Dota 2 API, but in time I decided to walk away from that, since I came conclusion that information must be visualized for more efficient perception and memorization. So I switched to Photoshop and Sony Vegas. I had to walk away from that as well in time, so now it’s just basic MS Excel scripts that I use occasionally.

— What kind of metrics are the most important in evaluating player’s actions?— As far as I know, “evaluating” players is a thing in other teams; we in Virtus.pro are against “numbers” when talking about Dota 2. My job — is to make an efficient and informed conclusion based on gathered data (summarize everything a team must focus their attention on during a game in 3-5 sentences), as opposed to talking about what kind of win rate Enigma with Refresher Orb + Aghs bought at 57 minutes as Dire on 70ms ping with 8% packet loss has. For evaluating player’s actions, I believe that making conclusions based on Dota 2 data — is almost entirely useless in an overwhelming majority of cases. The amount of variables in this game is so insanely high, that a player's “performance” could be dictated by personal chemistry inside the team, which is the case quite often, but “statsmen” would never figure that out.

— What is the most difficult component to analyze in Dota 2?— The word “analytics” nowadays has a very blurred meaning. There are analysts that work in-between the matches [on streams]. Their job — is to discuss “who’s right and who’s wrong,” that is as far as their direct responsibility goes. There are people like me, Loomdun (used to work in DC, now in Alliance), Bonkers (works in ex-Ad Finem [now mousesports]) — our responsibilities are completely opposite to the ones on the analyst desks on streams.To sum up, on the whole analysis — is quite a difficult task. Regarding me personally, the hardest part is to notice patterns in enemy actions.

— You used to work in Team Secret, could you tell us the difference between working there and in Virtus.pro?— In TS I was focusing more on “numbers” and on how to present those numbers to the players. Though, nobody forced me to do anything in particular, I was free to do what I thought was important.Right now I mostly focus on that the players ask me to do (especially Solo, the captain). The job is mostly the same, really. Same game, just slightly different responsibilities.

— Why don’t more teams have analysts, and how do “numbers” or “information visualisation,” as you put it, affect team’s preparation?— The reason is in the fact that many believe that all of this could be done by a coach. I believe that in time the volume of staff in teams will be only increasing. Regardless, numbers mostly affect the draft stage, warding and sometimes laning.

— Did players ever complain to you that your analysis doesn’t show their true level, that “it’s just numbers?”— That used to happen in the very beginning. Usually these kinds of things get solved after one or two discussions about “what you need and what you don’t need.” As I already said, Virtus.pro’s approach to Dota is a bit different from Team Secret.

— Who is currently the most efficient player in Virtus.pro?— Aleksei “Solo” Berezin. Always was, still is..

— What is so special about Solo?— I can only judge his play in Virtus.pro; before this, I didn’t pay any attention both to him in particular and to CIS scene in general. But back to the topic — I believe that Solo’s special feature is his immense amount of experience. Usually a captain on support position is required to know a whole lot of different patterns (different ways the game could develop) in any given situation, starting at minute 0. I believe that our captain is one of the best in the world in this regard at the moment. We came back from completely lost games thanks only to his calls, without even talking about him consistently having the biggest impact in our team in general.

I find the diffuse role the most interesting. There is things he does that doesn't fall under the analyst title. Common to smaller companies and structures, simply to make things flow in an optimal way. His main job being analysing the opponents but several other small stuff is there as well.

As for waiting for a computer, just get a gaming laptop and bring it with you on flights? It can play the game easily and with mobile internet you can just use 3G/4G to get the game data if you can't find a wired or wifi connection. Seems such a simple thing to solve with a one time expense (might need adapters for the different power grids).

There is always some talk about teams having to have "analysts" but I think this interview captures pretty well why it's tricky. Generally the data you can easily gather of a team is pretty meaningless without it being in the appropriate context. For example when preparing for a draft someone can say that a team has X winrate on a hero in certain number of games, but the information barely helps at all in structuring your approach for the draft if you don't also understand at what stage they typically pick the hero, with what, against what, etc. Even more so for ingame info. For example where a team wards, how they lane, how they move around, is so context specific that it's very hard to describe it with just simple numbers. Instead you have to somehow be able to figure out what the underlying logic is for your players to use the information inside the game.

"Everyone must forget the words CARRY/SUPPORT/GANKER, this is all rubbish. If you want to be useful, to win the game, you must play on all heroes, instead of crying like a baby when you have to play carry" - Puppey